Why do I love this problem book so much?

Well, that was cool.

I was trying to fit the pieces of SOMETIMES A DRAGON into a coherent story, and I was having trouble.  So I sat around all day just sort of nudging my subconscious every once in a while.  I finally sat down in late in the evening to try to write a chapter, and it all just sort of came together.

I don't know if it actually works, or whether anyone will want to read it.  But I've figured out new motivations for some of the characters, new histories, for which I can use much of the same writing.

So for instance, I have a scene where the shapeshifter narrator is a broom  (Yes, he's a broom.)  And when the creatures from the vats try to take it away form the Old Man, he freaks out.

So now, in the rewrite, I'm making the narrator less present in every scene.  So why does the Old Man freak out?  Well, I've established that the Old Man has had his brain fried, but he's trying desperately to remember the name of the Master.  The One True Name.  So I have it that he's carved the name into the broom -- and that's why he's freaked out.

Actually works better as a motivation.  But everything else in the scene is exactly the same.

It's a little bit like being creative with leftovers.  All have all these pieces but they don't make a meal.  Except if I recombine them.

It is a very creative process in some ways.  It isn't what you would come up with if you had nothing but fresh ingredients, but it has its own appeal. 

Or another way to put it, it's as if I had filmed a whole bunch of material -- artfully lit, beautifully acted, but the story was either too distant or too cutesy, too romantic or too formal.  All at the same time.

So a different editor comes along and combines all the scenes in a whole different way.  Same footage, but different slant.

What's kind of cool about this is that if I had tried to do it earlier, I wouldn't have known what to do.  I wouldn't have been ruthless enough.  It would have seemed insurmountable.

Now, I have enough faith in my subconscious, that if I think about it long enough, I certain that I'll come up with solutions.  It's about the characters -- why they do things and why we care.

So out goes the whole science background -- it wasn't necessary, and felt anachronistic.

Out goes a whole bunch of cutesy scenes.  Out go overly romantic scenes.  There still way more of these scenes than I'm comfortable with, frankly, but a lot less than before.

Out goes the shape-changing main narrator, who was in every scene.  I cut him back to only three manifestations, and put the rest of the book into a more general 3rd person.

Out goes the main character who seems to be all powerful but without much motivation.The main character is not quite so all powerful and now we know his motivation.

And so on and so forth.

Instead, it's a less ambitious book but a much more readable one, I think.  Much more involved in character's motivations -- that's the simple lesson I think I've learned in the last year.  You only care about the characters if you understand and sympathize why they do what they do and say what they say.

I love all the writing in this book.  SOMETIMES A DRAGON is like the troublesome child I just can't help loving no matter what he or she does.  Objectively, I have no idea why I like this book so much.  Sure, some of it is because I was falling in love when I wrote it.  But most of it is because this is the first book I wrote without regard as to whether anyone else would like it.

So I see all the warts, all the faults, and I still love it.

I'm trying to fix it, so that others will love it too.

I would have thought that I would hate doing this.  I've often expressed my dislike for rewriting.  But this is more like well, Re-----writing.  That is -- writing something that already existed.  It feels more like writing.  It takes just as much time.  That is, I could write something completely new in the same time span.

So I'd better like this book, if I'm going to expend that kind of energy on it.

I'm trying not to overthink it, but to feel it.

I also have kind of decided that not everything needs to be explained.  Like a poem, a story can have things that aren't explained if they FEEL right.  I mean, you can't be blatant.  But not everything has to be spelled out.  (One of the problems with writer's group critique for instance is that they always notice what they don't know -- which is weird anyway because you can't know everything in individual chapters.)

Finally, I'm roughly 40% of the way through the old draft, and I've cut about 50% of the material.  But...from here on out, I think the story is fairly straight forward, so I'm only expecting to cut maybe 25% of the material.

It's going to be a small book, around 50,000 words, but that's all right, I think.  Maybe not for a paperbook, but O.K. for an ebook.  Besides, I've decided to quit worrying about length, because it usually seems to get to the right length without my trying.